Ok, but the guy was talking about starting his own Steam-like distribution service. My point was to play Counter-Strike (source) I was required to install Steam (good marketing of Steam itself), now to start "competition" with Steam service would clearly require to have similar AAA game in your offering already and that might be a problem. Forget things like known publishers committing their catalogs into some new 3th party service.

Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to start up their own, competing service.

Sure and LOL, they were the first carrying titles like Counter-Strike and Half-life, pretty much forcing people to install Steam in order to play these highly desired games. NOBODY would install Steam without some good game already in. You can try to start a competing company with no such games, good luck.

Most users actually use what is pre-installed, a clear attempt for MS Office to gain new grounds. Why do you think the IE6 is so widespread still ? It is the default bundled browser on Windows XP. This is not a good news for Open Office or Google.

I agree that reusing some existing API is the way to do it, but I meant to use some other "CryptoAPI" that exists on Linux or elsewhere (OpenSSL?), I haven't written a word about creating their own. Also to calculate checksums, hashes or randomize keys you do not need anything platform, system or OS dependent I would presume, any such a *NIX code (already in use there anyway) should do the trick be easy to port to Windows.

Partly agreed, but if the app is HTML/Java and can run in a web-browser like environment then you can find such an app on the web anyway and already. What is the point ? We are talking about the added value of AppStore grade applications that somebody would like to pay for, they are barring open source/free software -- they want money -- while openly promoting low-end application interface (web) that can't bring the added value, this is plain stupid, sorry, but this got failure drawn all over.